Artificially generated clips serve as “nostalgia machines and emotional cliché amplifiers” ahead of Feb. 23 election.
BERLIN — “Do you remember how beautiful Germany once was?”
It’s a question asked in a video shared by far-right chancellor candidate Alice Weidel that depicts a country that never actually existed — because it’s been generated by artificial intelligence.
The evocative scenes include a light-haired toddler smiling up with bright eyes, the background lit with blurry strings of Christmas lights and an ornament-laden tree; a young blonde woman in a sequined top dancing jubilantly with disco balls hanging behind her; andchildren in a bus laughing and playing on their way to school, joy shining on their faces.
AI-generated content like this is helping Weidel’s anti-migration, populist Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, make both sides of its vision — the idyllic, nostalgia-driven future it promises to bring as well as the dystopian one it’s warning about should others win the election — look startlingly real.
Ahead of the country’s Feb. 23 election, when the AfD is expected to win more than 20 percent of the vote, top politicians in the party are posting and sharing a slew of AI-generated images and videos, joining an entire online ecosystem of AI-generated content boosting the party.
« It’s about showing what life might look like with the AfD in Germany, and how it would compare with if we didn’t come to power,” Norbert Kleinwächter, a parliamentarian for the AfD who has been among the party’s most active posters of AI-generated content, told POLITICO. “We don’t just describe what we want in words. We illustrate it and present it ― and of course sometimes amplify it.”
Telescope into the future
The national party’s website features a helmet-clad coal miner, a carefree woman dancing, a laughing man and a smiling elderly woman, all of which were AI-generated. These stock images depicting the kind of “regular” Germans who support the AfD are typical of much of the AI-generated content used by the party.
But they’re not just employing it to portray their supporters. The party is using AI-generated content to bring to life its promise to return the country to an idealized, better time — and to prevent what they see as a dark future brought about by increased immigration.
For the AfD, “AI-generated clips serve as nostalgia machines and emotional cliché amplifiers with imagery referencing historic aesthetics from the 19th and 20th century,” said Marcus Bösch, a researcher at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
A video from the regional-level AfD in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, published ahead of the eastern German state elections last fall, illustrates that well by hearkening back to a supposed golden age.
“Your ancestors had a homeland in Brandenburg ― this is where your grandpa took your grandma dancing, this is where your mother went to kindergarten, this is where your grandpa built his house,” the narrator says, over retro-style images of young people smiling in a dancehall. “This is where your parents brought you into the world and made you the person you are today.”
That’s around the point when the videos typically cut to dark, ominous-looking footage meant to evoke the future of Germany if the AfD doesn’t come to power. In these clips, elderly Germans gather plastic bottles to make ends meet or look despairingly at empty wallets. Women walk down the street in burqas. Groups of men with dark skin leer directly at the viewer.
AfD leaders are open about the way they use the technology. Kleinwächter said he wouldn’t call the AfD’s approach a nostalgia machine but rather “a telescope into the future. »
“It’s not about saying something negative about a certain group or a certain person or something, » he said. “That’s not the goal — the goal is to put our finger on the sore spot and to present it visually.”
‘We’ll deport you all’
The AI use by party officials is just a small portion of the AI-generated efforts to boost the AfD. User-generated AI content and pro-AfD AI influencers post supportive content across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X.
“There is an entire fan army engaging in a far-reaching and effective participatory propaganda attempt,” Bösch said. “Messages are amplified and emotionally charged through fan-edits with supporters flooding comment sections with pro-AfD hashtags like the blue heart emoji to further trigger the algorithm.”
There are AI songs like “Re-migration Hit,” which members of the party’s youth wing came under fire for singing and dancing jubilantly to last fall — “Now it’s time to go, we’ll deport you all,” the song’s lyrics say.
Individual pro-AfD users post everything from blonde girls in AfD blue outfits riding dogs in a sea of German flags, to deepfake videos of mainstream politicians kissing or going to jail.
Some users have even created entire AI influencer accounts to boost the party. One account, purportedly a woman named Larissa Wagner, posts AI-generated images of an attractive brown-haired woman along with pro-AfD and anti-immigration statements.
“I’m so sad, I’m so angry. #Magdeburg is my mother’s hometown,” the account wrote after an attack at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, along with an image of a woman looking down concerned. “Honestly, all Syrians have to go. Too much has happened.”
The AfD’s approach to AI in this election speaks to a more fundamental feature of the party, said Maik Fielitz, a researcher on far- and extreme-right movements at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena: its sometimes-tenuous connection to the truth.
“It’s quite obvious they want to produce an attitude toward AI,” he said, “which is that it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not.”
